Don’t get too worried about always downloading the “latest” release. These releases are essentially snapshots of the current state of packages + an installer. It’s rolling system. I installed 0.7 almost a year ago, yet my system is identical to what I would have if I installed from the 0.7.1 ISO.

This is all thanks to the excellent ‘pacman’ package manager, that keeps your system running sweetly 24/7.

Um, most of those option names are taken directly from rpm. e.g. rpm -qi and rpm -ql. The rest are fairly obvious extensions from rpm (which doesn’t understand the concept of a repository) to a package manager that does. Every other package manager I can think of can do that stuff and more easily. Nothing revolutionary there, and I don’t see those commands as particularly easier to understand or remember than any other package manager’s.

There are a few small gripes I have with Arch, but overall, if I was to rate it, I would give it a 7.5/10. If it would support suspend-to-RAM *automatically* (by closing the laptop lid), it would have been a 8.5/10. That’s how much important ACPI is (for me) as I usually run Arch on my two laptops. The last few versions of the kernel is a bit broken on Arch and it doesn’t support ACPI correctly (because SMP is compiled-in and apparently this created a problem according to an Arch maintainer). Hopefully, someone will work on the issue soon.

I think that they simply don’t know how to fix it. Arch does not have a real kernel hacker like Ubuntu/SuSE/Fedora/Mdk/Debian have to figure out what the problem is and create kernel patches or suggest fixes. Fixing ACPI is not an easy task either.

Honestly Eugenia, if you don’t like the distribution’s philosophy, don’t use the distribution. Arch is all about simplicity, with minimal patching. All they patch the kernel with is -as in order to fix ‘obvious bugs and vulnerabilities.’ Things like this are the reason a lot of Archers use Arch, so please, stop trying to change every project to fit your needs already. Gnomes not going to do it, and neither is Arch.

Besides, you hit it right on the head, it’s a distribution for power users. The mission statement makes it abundantly clear:

Arch Linux is an i686-optimized linux distribution targeted at competent linux users (read: not afraid of the commandline)

If you aren’t prepared to configure your system, it’s probably not for you. That said, hopefully the new initrd movement will make it easier to cope with the various problems the increasingly important SMP inclusion causes.

Ethyriel, please be careful how you talk over here. You started talking extremely angrily for no good reason. I do like Arch, more than any other Linux distro. That doesn’t mean though that everything works perfectly and we all should shut up instead of discussing here. Arch does have is problems, and ACPI is one of them. And Judd and the rest of the team is aware of them, so no reason to reply in this way.

Ethyriel might not be VERY polite, but i can stand his kind of talk very well – if we can’t speak up like this, things would get boring 😉

we might not need stupid comments like from the “joe user” guy (rated -5 for a very good reason), but imho we shouldn’t soften things too much. a flamewar is too much, but a firm discussion with firm language – that’s fine with me, i acutally prefer it above “lets LOVE LOVE LOVE”…

(for example, i LOVE the language linus generally uses… its clear-cut, and he supports it with well-thought arguments. so should we ban him or language like his? i think not…)

I’m sorry if I sounded angry, but no, I am. The ACPI issue is with Linux, not with Arch. To expect a project which plainly respects the work of developers and attempts not to patch their work wherever possible, and who’s community expects the stability and baseline compatability we’ve come to know, expecting a kernel patched beyond -as is ludicrous, and honestly, a bit egotistical if not lacking the most basic understanding of the projects mission.

One patch may be alright, and not cause any problems. But what about the next patch, and then another after that? It’s bound to cause a problem for someone, and may lead to them not being able to run Arch without building their own kernel at install time. It’s much saner to add functionality rather than have to remove it from the default, else you’ll very quickly lose that clean/lean architecture you obviously appreciate.

Frugalware, like the name suggests, is closer to Slackware than Arch. IIRC, Arch Linux was inspired by CRUX and it has a different “feel” from Slackware. Newbies will probably find Slackware and Frugalware easier than Arch. But there’s an Arch-based liveCD, Archie, that might be useful for introducing Arch Linux to less experienced Linux users.

I’ve been using it for just about a year now and it’s the only distro that’s been able to keep me using it for that long, as I tend to be a distro-hopper. Some of the latest upgrades with all the kernel, udev, and initrd changes have been problematic for some users, but most are managing to overcome them without too much effort.

I’ve been using Arch for a while now, so I know it’s massively more up to date than 0.7 seems to suggest and it’s nice to see a new version out which shows people it is. It’s also good news because I’m contemplating doing a fresh install to get rid of some things I don’t need and am too lazy to hunt down with “pacman -R <package>”. Getting there from 0.7 was, in my opinion, too much of a bother since the things I don’t need aren’t actually harmful. I wouldn’t recommend Arch to a beginning Linux user, but if you have the experience to do the required configuration it’s a very fast, very powerful system.

For me, Arch is the perfect Distro. It’s much easier to install and mantain than Gentoo, and it includes much less (for me)unnecessary stuff than Ubuntu or SuSE. It also has up-to-date packages and good support for both binary-(trough pacman) and source-based(trough ABS) software installation.

The “Keep it simple”-mentality is great too, and the forums and wiki might have as many contributors as Gentoos or Ubuntus, but they are still very good in helping you with the most common problems.

For better suspend support I recommend the archck-kernel from the “community” repository.

I had some problems upgrading Udev(as it removes Hotplug), my mouse didn’t work to be specific.

shouldn’t we ban the “joe user” guy, he is annoying and at leat in this thread he didn’t say anything usefull…

a bit more ontopic, i want to ‘join’ theine in his question: how can arch be faster than other linux’es? i know why suse is kind’a slow, they load lots of stuff one doesn’t need. but with lets say ubuntu, there isn’t much unneeded cruft loaded, and the stuff that is can be disabled easilly. also, not including /usr/doc doesn’t make anything faster…

Edit: GRRRRR. I still can’t post replies. What is wrong with this system? Where can I submit a bugreport, because it’s been bugging me a lot.

Well I wouldn’t know. There’s not one single cause for that. It’s more the sum of it. i686, daemons loading in background/parallel during boot, NPTL, latest kernel/X/gcc/glibc and probably more.

But please note that Arch doesn’t evolve as much around performace as Gentoo does, for instance. It’s very nice to have a fast OS, but I have the feeling that maintainability and simplicity are higher on the list of priorities.

I also like the “pacman -Rcs package” command, uninstall the package, everything which depends on the given package and everything which is a dependency for the given package but not for any other installed packages.

Very handy if you are to try another desktop enviroment for example, add some extra programs for the desktop enviroment, want to remove the desktop enviroment and everything related to it and get lost when tracking each installed package, what is an unneeded dependencies after the package is removed, what apps did you install that require libraries installed as dependencies of the package etc etc…

“Honestly Eugenia, if you don’t like the distribution’s philosophy, don’t use the distribution.”

This the kind of asinine remark that stops development.

In such a young project like Arch Linux, people who contribute with objective criticism should be listened to.

This thing about ‘love or leave it’ sucks, thank god some people see the light. Witness this udev thing it had to change for the better.

Putting OOo 2.0 in the repos when it ain’t ready also does not make sense, might as well leave the previous version that works and can be put to work out of the repos instead monkeying around with OOo2.0

Everybody talks about Arch being mean and lean, but it’s not lean, it needs the equivalent of ‘localepurge’. I got Debian Sarge on another box with the same apps at 728 MB of space, while AL with the same apps is ocupying 1.3 MB of space, it can’t get rid of the crud, and this is while using:

pacman -Rcs

pacman -S –clean

The AUR apps have to be incorporated into the mainstream asap.

So, in conclusion: we have a good distro, easy to install, configure, but as any young distro with a few devs, needs more time to mature, I will keep on using it, but please keep the macho stuff out of it.

If her criticism were objective she’d be considering the patching policy of the project rather than speaking out of self-importance. The default kernel needs to be as basic as possible, so that users have a solid baseline when problems arise.

No, it’s not an asinine remark. It’s this sort of defense of a project’s mission that keeps it from becoming a bloated mess like so many others. And no, it’s not entirely about love it or leave it, there’s plenty of room for compromise. But compromise does NOT belong at the project’s foundation.

Oh, cummon, please… ArchCK kernel (with swsusp2 support and all the goodies) is fine for most laptops, and for the ones it doesn’t work, the ABS Arch system allows you building a custom kernel with no effort at all…

I have an XXX chinese lappy, and excluding the Motorola SM56 winmodem and the TI 4:1 card reader (which works shittily under Windoze as well…) everything else, including ACPI functions works GR8 under Arch.

Just don’t expect everything working right-out-of-teh-box ina DYI distro, and by the way under Kanotix (which is IMO the best distro for laptops by far) the SM56 and the card reader do not work, as well…

making silly posts without any real idea about the OS does not help at all.

For me (and only for me, who am a non-geek at all), Arch is the best Linux distro out there, period…

Arch doesn’t have gigantic dependency list, it only installs the dependencies needed and you go yourself to see if you need the rest, for example, install a gstreamer frontend, you get gstreamer but no gstreamer plugins. Install KDE, you get konqueror with samba support, but you have to install samba to be able to use it.

Since packages are split like, mozilla, KDE, gnome etc in their own directries, the main directories won’t grow too big (I belive I heard that directories with very many files in can decrease performance)

Sometimes the –clean switch breaks, make sure your /var/cache/pacman/pkg has been cleaned properly. Running XFCE and quite a bit of Gnome I’m at 6.75GB. An ‘rm /var/cache/pacman/pkg/* dropped me down below 6GB, and this is a fairly fresh ftp install, so not much old cache was present.

The only thing I know of that Debian does to reduce space usage, above Arch, is to split packages.